Since the advent of digital scholarship in the humanities, decades of extensive, distributed scholarly efforts have produced a digital scholarly record that is increasingly scattered, heterogeneous, and independent of curatorial institutions. Digital scholarship produces collections with unique scholarly and cultural value—collections that serve as hubs for collaboration and communication, engage broad audiences, and support new research. Yet, lacking systematic support for digital scholarship in libraries, digital humanities collections are facing a widespread crisis of sustainability. This paper provides outcomes of a multimodal study of sustainability challenges confronting digital collections in the humanities, characterizing institutional and community-oriented strategies for sustaining collections. Strategies that prioritize community engagement with collections and the maintenance of sociotechnical workflows suggest possibilities for novel approaches to collaborative, community-centred sustainability for digital humanities collections.

Data management plans (DMPs) have increasingly been encouraged as a key component of institutional and funding body policy. Although DMPs necessarily place administrative burden on researchers, proponents claim that DMPs have myriad benefits, including enhanced research data quality, increased rates of data sharing, and institutional planning and compliance benefits.   In this article, we explore the international history of DMPs and describe institutional and funding body DMP policy. We find that economic and societal benefits from presumed increased rates of data sharing was the original driver of mandating DMPs by funding bodies. Today, 86% of UK Research Councils and 63% of US funding bodies require submission of a DMP with funding applications. Given that no major Australian funding bodies require DMP submission, it is of note that 37% of Australian universities have taken the initiative to internally mandate DMPs. Institutions both within Australia and internationally frequently promote the professional benefits of DMP use, and endorse DMPs as ‘best practice’. We analyse one such typical DMP implementation at a major Australian institution, finding that DMPs have low levels of apparent translational value. Indeed, an extensive literature review suggests there is very limited published systematic evidence that DMP use has any tangible benefit for researchers, institutions or funding bodies.  We are therefore led to question why DMPs have become the go-to tool for research data professionals and advocates of good data practice. By delineating multiple use-cases and highlighting the need for DMPs to be fit for intended purpose, we question the view that a good DMP is necessarily that which encompasses the entire data lifecycle of a project. Finally, we summarise recent developments in the DMP landscape, and note a positive shift towards evidence-based research management through more researcher-centric, educative, and integrated DMP services.

Yesterday morning the NIH released their Data Management Sharing Policy (DMS) and of course there went the rest of MY week/month/year/2021. But of course I have thoughts and summaries and then ques…

NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Final NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing NOT-OD-21-013. NIH

Machine-actionable data management plans (maDMPs) are happening. Over the past several years we’ve contributed to community discussions and various events to suss out what we all mean by this term …

Brown Bag Lunch presentation for researchers on how to comply with DMP and public access sections on grants, as required by the OSTP memo of 2013. Note: Many s…

Good to read this one for tone.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library conducted an analysis of 1,260 Data Management Plans (DMPs) submitted in National Science Foundation (NSF) proposals from July 2011 through November 2013. Each DMP was assigned controlled vocabulary and keyword terms which summarized the proposed data management mechanisms for storing and sharing data. A database composed of the proposal’s title, PI (Principal Investigator), PI’s department and college, NSF grant number, funded status, assigned DMP vocabulary, and keyword terms was constructed. As of May 2014, a total of 298 of these UIUC proposals had been funded by the NSF. Our analysis of this sample revealed no significant statistical differences in proposed data storage and reuse venues between funded and unfunded proposals. However, there was a statistically higher frequency of use of the campus institutional repository and disciplinary repositories in proposals submitted after October 2012.

Funding for Office of Science

A big news item coming out of the Digital Infrastructure Summit held in Ottawa on January 28-29, 2014 was the announcement that Canada’s federal research councils will introduce policy change…

Potential preservation plans for student assessment.

First DMP compliance tool I've seen!

"John Bargh provided the data from his original study (Bargh & Shalev, 2012), but demanded that Donnellan and colleagues keep the data confidential and not share it or their re-analyses with anyone. That demand flies in the face of both APA and NIH ethical guidelines."